Step into an alleyway in the Northeast Washington neighborhood known as Stronghold, and you will see a vegetable patch, a campfire, a view of the Capitol and a cluster of what neighbors call “those tiny people, building their tiny houses.”

The people aren’t really tiny, but their homes are — 150 to 200 square feet of living space, some with gabled roofs, others with bright cedar walls, compact bathrooms and cozy sleeping lofts that add up to living spaces that are smaller than the walk-in closets in a suburban McMansion…

If these affordable homes — which maximize every inch of interior space and look a little like well-constructed playhouses — are the dream, they represent a radically fresh version of what it takes to make Americans happy.

Here’s a look at the entire living space of one such “tiny house,” courtesy of Boneyard Studios, the builders behind the DC dollhouse experiment:

Barbie’s Lowered Expectations House. Put that thing in Flyover Country and cue the Palin jokes. Put it in northeast DC and it magically becomes a fashion statement.

It’s odd… You only read stories about how great it is to be poor, how empowering it is to settle for less, when a Democrat is president. If a Republican was in charge, would WaPo be doing stories about how awesome it is to live in a breadbox?

They’re just trying to prepare you for the inevitable crash. Their ideas don’t work and they know it, so now all they can do is try to make you think their failure is somehow a statement of principle. The dystopian post-Obama future depicted in Dan Simmons’ Flashback gets a little more plausible every minute.

Get ready for many more reminders from our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the media that we don’t know how good we’ve got it. And if we want to hang onto what little we have left, we’d better keep electing Democrats.

They think you’re stupid, America. And look how stunningly you just proved them right.